Essay On Occupational Therapy

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During Covid-19 was when I was first inspired to look into the health field, I researched different health-related professions. With more research, occupational therapy was the field that caught my eye. When I was a freshman in college, Covid-19 happened, and this shortened my desired college experience in half. Imagine starting a new chapter of your life, a time of new experiences, people, and places. One minute everything in my life seems normal, and the next moment everything is changing. I never noticed the small things I was doing on an everyday basis until it was gone. Things like walking to class or being able to walk down the hallway to see a friend. During this time, I felt as if I had lost some sense of my independence, and it could …show more content…

I believe that all people we meet in life touch us in some way. Over a semester, I shadowed 3 facilities that treated different types of patients. I have been able to witness occupational therapists that work with someone as young as five years old and someone as old as seventy years old, and I have seen them all meet goals they did not think they could achieve. Not only are occupational therapists in a place where they truly get to know their patients and their unique needs, but occupational therapists are their patients' supporters, and they are able to encourage and push patients to meet their goals. I witnessed this firsthand while shadowing in the hospital. In the acute rehabilitation portion of the hospital, there were many patients I had seen that were in the recovery process, and occupational therapists were there to create discharge plans for their patients. In this process, I saw many patients working on mobility issues and activities of daily living such as dressing themselves or showering. One patient I shadowed had one last checkpoint to meet before being able to be discharged. I watched how over the course of their time at the hospital the occupational therapist was able to not only support this patient but also push them towards their goals. This patient was able to finally meet this one last goal and be discharged just in time for Christmas and seeing someone achieve something they never thought they could is a feeling like no other. Witnessing that showed me that becoming an occupational therapist is precisely where I wanted to be. I want to be the person that is able to facilitate these moments of pure joy but also facilitates the hard moments when patients think their goals are far from being